Is H&M’s New Lower-Priced Clothing Encouraging Disposable Fashion?

Call it the $4.95 frock that rocked the fashion world. It costs less than a Grande Caramel Frappuccino at Starbucks, according to Vogue, and it’s cheaper than a six-piece Chicken McNuggets Value Meal at McDonalds. You could take that money to your neighborhood CVS and still come up short on a $5.99 tube of Wet N’ Wild Shade Adjusting Foundation. Although H&M has been trumpeting its “high fashion, low cost” ethos for years, the Swedish fashion retailer has reached a new nadir with its freshly slashed prices—cheap even by fast-fashion standards. And that vertically striped, sweetheart-neckline cocktail dress may just be the beginning.

FAST-FOOD PRICES

“Our business idea is to offer fashion and quality at the best price,” Håcan Andersson, a spokesman for the company, tells Ecouterre, before referring us to information listed on the company’s website. But company mission aside, at a time when the apparel industry is getting thrashed by price hikes, H&M’s move remains an audacious one. $4.95 dresses? $20 trench coats? What universe does the Swedish retailer live in? And more important, how is H&M getting away with it?

“It just means they are squeezing the stakeholders in their supply chain to pull this off,” says Howard Brown, co-founder of Stewart + Brown, a Los Angeles-based pioneer in sustainable fashion. “Their copycat competitors will do the same. If this trend has any staying power then we might as well kiss the American apparel manufacturing sector, and those hundred thousand are so jobs that are still left, goodbye.”

$4.95 dresses? $20 trench coats? What universe does H&M live in—and how is it pulling it off?

Pay close attention to H&M’s shell game, Brown warns. “Anyone who knows anything about marketing and advertising knows this is a strategy that employs a ‘loss leader’ to send a message to customers that ‘we have super deals’ in hopes of getting people in the stores,” he tells Ecouterre. “The next headline they feed the press will have something to do with the dresses and trench coats being ‘so hot’ they couldn’t keep them in stock. That will make their customer race to the store next time they spot a bargain like this.”

Scarier still is the arms race H&M’s decision might trigger. “Watch for Walmart, Kmart, and Target’s response to this campaign as they are all going after the same customer now,” Brown adds. “It’s a race to the bottom. No thanks.”

So here’s the 800-pound gorilla in the room: How can H&M produce clothes so cheaply if it’s abiding by ethical labor standards? “The way factories work is they’re pushed to make the largest quantities in the least amount of time,” Eliza Starbuck, the designer behind Bright Young Things, explains. “This is how the factory makes its money.”

Garment factories are pushed to make the largest quantities of clothing in the least amount of time.

In other words, the greater the number of goods a factory churns out, the more the factory honchos get paid. Basic math, right? Although making double time doesn’t necessarily mean that the garment workers are earning less—their pay rate usually remains unchanged, notes Starbuck, and they might get overtime hours—if the factory has to turn out twice as many garments in the same amount of time with the same number of workers, something has to give. “If they’re making garments that quickly, the quality is completely lost,” she says. “There’s no promising what quality will be like.”

H&M isn’t starting this trend. The entire fashion industry is encouraging disposable fashion. Yesterday’s dress is out of date, and out of fashion. If you don’t dress seasonal you look like an idiot.

These are the “fashion rules” drilled into people year after year by the industry and by peers. This is why stereotypes exist about fashionable women having huge numbers of shoes and a closet full of clothing, yet “nothing to wear”.

The entire industry is organized around disposable fashion. After all – if you use a little black dress for five years, it’s five years of revenue they never see from you. The business has grown as big as it is only because it has found ways to make people chuck out the old, and buy the new.

I find it intriguing that the author presents this article as investigative journalism through use of the question marked headline, then proceeds to cite only a handful of small business entrepreneurs and independent label fashion designers as experts on H&M’s manufacturing and marketing practices. An inquiry put through to someone who actually worked for H&M, or any big box retailer for that matter, might make for a more balanced article. How, for instance, is Mr. Brown so certain that H&M must be “squeezing the stakeholders in their supply chain” in order to keep costs down? As a veteran of fashion retail, I can assure you there are many ways to cut costs, and operations at an L.A. boutique like Mr. Browns, where a t-shirt costs $65, are going to be vastly different than operations at a global retailer like H&M, where the very nature of their business allows for t-shirts to cost only $5.
Speaking of the price difference, as someone who lives in “middle America” and has little to none of the disposable income that those cited in this article are so concerned about, I am always thrilled to be able to dress my family in ANYTHING for under $20 a garment, and I can guarantee that it will be worn at least a year or longer due to sheer financial necessity, allowing for greater financial leeway when it comes to goods of greater consequence, i.e. food and shelter, two things that I highly doubt people who own their own sustainable fashion boutique in L.A. or Brooklyn have any difficulty securing.
The most insufferable part of this article, however, is the insinuation by both Mr. Brown and Ms.Starbuck that H&M and companies like them are encouraging a “race to the bottom” by offering $4.95 dresses as well as being “irresponsible about what happens to the goods after consumers purchase them,” and should somehow enforce both taste and rate of consumption guidelines on the general populace. I personally enjoy living in a society where I am allowed to purchase whatever kind of clothing I want and replace it at whatever rate of speed I am economically capable of, which I thankfully do not have to justify to the Mr. Browns and Ms.Starbucks of the world. I suspect that the sort of society the author and her sources slyly suggest would be environmentally beneficial, i.e. one in which a personal liberty like clothing is mandated and controlled by government and corporations, would be a society conducive to neither small business entrepreneurship nor uncensored internet journalism. What an amusing quandary the author and her sources might find themselves in were their fondest wishes to come true.

There is a whole industry of cheap knock off stores that cater to women who either can’t fit into a size 4, can’t afford a $200 dress and what to look good. Dots in particular is comparable to H&M. I have pants I brought years ago that still fit and wear great at $18 .

The problem with fashion is so much changes so quick you can’t keep up without going broke. I know I can’t afford cashmere, silk and organic cotton so I dig in racks at Marshall’s and Filene’s looking for a deal. Then I go to Dots for updates in style and have whatever doesn’t fit nicely tailored for a few bucks. And that is usually the only difference between an expensive piece and cheep stuff.

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